iPhone Bugs: Home Button not working?

Several of our readers (and one of our editors...) are reporting a bug where the iPhone Home Button does not always respond to single-click or double-clicks. It might be software related as most people seem to have begun noticing this problem after installing iOS 4.1. It was hoped the bug would be fixed in iOS 4.2.1 but no such luck. Other causes that have been considered include a hardware short or dust or lint getting under the button. Ally also mentions that it may be caused by the home button not being properly centred. Possible symptoms and fixes, after the break.

Reader comments

iPhone Bugs: Home Button not working?

I know 2 people that did follow this but messed up their inside as they plugged and bent it up towards screen. Maybe they did it to roughly but many of us decided not to take that chance. Thanks though.

Been dealing with this issue for about 6 months!!!! You are DA MAN!!! Genius Bar should send you a check for helping all these iPhone users that they could not help themselves, including me!! Thank you sooo much!

Unbelievable...My wife bought me this phone less than a week ago and I was having the same problem. Thought I was gonna have to return it til I found your post. Tried it and BINGO it worked. I think part of the problem is being a little overzealous when pushing the home button and flexing the plate the button sets on inside. When you perform this adjustment, you are flexing the plate back into shape. That being said it would behoove us all to press the button more gently as flexing the plate internally, repeatedly may not work after awhile. I say this as an electronics technician with some experience. Thanks for the heads up on this one.

Thank you so much!!! I've been doing the restore from backup every two weeks! It worked but it's been getting worse and worse and the restore from backup is just a temporary fix. Now it's like my iPhone is back to normal. I cannot thank you enough for this post!!

Thank you so much!!! I've been doing the restore from backup every two weeks! It worked but it's been getting worse and worse and the restore from backup is just a temporary fix. Now it's like my iPhone is back to normal. I cannot thank you enough for this post!!

that is real funny, who first think that would work BUT it really works at least now.I tried resetting my phone and many other things I tried but problem came back after working ok for short time. I still can't believe it works that way,many thanks to you, saved my time

that is real funny, who first think that would work BUT it really works at least now.I tried resetting my phone and many other things I tried but problem came back after working ok for short time. I still can't believe it works that way,many thanks to you, saved my time

that is real funny, who first think that would work BUT it really works at least now.I tried resetting my phone and many other things I tried but problem came back after working ok for short time. I still can't believe it works that way,many thanks to you, saved my time

that is real funny, who first think that would work BUT it really works at least now.I tried resetting my phone and many other things I tried but problem came back after working ok for short time. I still can't believe it works that way,many thanks to you, saved my time

that is real funny, who first think that would work BUT it really works at least now.I tried resetting my phone and many other things I tried but problem came back after working ok for short time. I still can't believe it works that way,many thanks to you, saved my time

that is real funny, who first think that would work BUT it really works at least now.I tried resetting my phone and many other things I tried but problem came back after working ok for short time. I still can't believe it works that way,many thanks to you, saved my time

Holy crap that simpleand it worked! I have been struggling with this for aboit a week. I just started happening amd I tried everything from compressed air to restore! I love iPhone! Amd iPhone community!

i will no longer go to church on sundays, i will now build a shrine to you killer woo and pray there in stead, we were not planning anymore children but now we have no choice but to have two boys called, killer and woo.
this is how much this bloody back button has done my head in,vodafone wanted £150.00 to fix.
you take care killer you are worth your weight in gold,

You're the man. Works fine now thanks to God the almighty then to you. I wanted to disassemble and reassemble my iphone as I knew it was some connection inside wasn't in good contact with the button flex. What prevented me was that I didn't want to lose the warranty. Thanks again.

You're the man. Works fine now thanks to God the almighty then to you. I wanted to disassemble and reassemble my iphone as I knew it was some connection inside wasn't in good contact with the button flex. What prevented me was that I didn't want to lose the warranty. Thanks again.

Wow! Yesterday I was so fed up I took my phone to the Apple store. Somewhere between my house and the store my home button began working perfectly. The guy at the store was like, "I'm not sure what to tell you, and by the way the little pink moisture indicator dot is tripped, so your phone is no longer under warranty.". True, my iPhone spent a split second in a Diet Coke(oops) but it never seemed affected by this and this home button problem started way before the Diet Coke incident. I left the store so frustrated knowing the home button problem was sure to return as it did tonight. Now I took your advice and it 's working perfectly. THANK YOU. Btw, I plugged my phone into the car charger on the way to the Apple store so that's prob what fixed it.

WOW WOW WOW !!! Worked like a harm .. a fix that takes 2 seconds !!!
Here are more detailed tips on how to do it ..
First make sure that the problem is physical.. when you click the home button several times it does not respond to you .. everything else on the phone works perfect ..
The problem is intermittent, that means most of the time the button works and one day it stops responding.
Insert the charging cable, (make sure it is not blocked to the wall)
Push the cable from the bottom to the top, as if you were trying to slightly rotate the plug around an imaginary axis where it is plugged to the phone. Very slightly, you don't want to break anything. It is better to put one finger on the bottom across the plug and your thumb right under the home button (not on the home button) instead of trying to bend the cable toward the screen with both fingers holding the plug. When you hear a click while doing that, that is when your home button if fixed. You can repeat that several times if it does not work from the first time.
Trying to bend the plug downwards does not do the trick.
Be patient, don't use too much force and good luck.

OH my god you're AMAZING!!! I seriously can't believe that worked. You literally saved me (probably) tons of money getting it fixed and the self esteem of whatever poor verizon employee i would've probably ended up freaking out on for not being able to fix it.

i found that after cleaning out the port where you plug in the charger actually increased the sensitivity of my home button, it hasnt fixed it but it has stopped me from mashing the button to pieces trying to get it to work.

Nothing helps, I'm jailbroken and that's the only salvation especially that I hate physical button :)
Activator and QuickDo is the home button home remedy, I could simply put now dock tape over that stupid thing!

I bought a otterbox for my iPhone 4 and it worked fine for the first month. Then the home button wouldn't work properly for a few days. So I took the case off n tried it and the button worked fine. A week later it's happened again and once again I took the case off and tried it. And it continued to not work. I have the latest update n have tried restoring. Maybe I should go to apple and have it replaced?

After one month of having the iPhone 4 my home button started to stick sometimes. I tried several of the so-called fixes. Some worked for a while but now (after two months) my home button is unresponsive ALL of the time. I ordered a replacement phone from Verizon today. I know several other people that have this problem. Note to Apple - instead of coming out with the "latest and greatest" every 3 months make sure what you put out there works!

The fixes listed below did not work for me. I took the phone into an Apple Store, and they replaced it. I asked if this problem is occurring frequently, the staff was rather illusive, saying only that the home button was one of the few moving parts on the phone, so it's bound to cause trouble...but I've got two other iPhones, of previous releases...and these have home buttons that are still working quite well...my advice. Get it replaced. Synch and back up your photos first, of course.

Neither of these two worked for me but just found one that did; if you can get the button to work just once and double click to see open applications, close mail and then do a soft restart holding both buttons. After the phone Rebooted the home button works great. I now manually close mail when I'm done using it until a permanent fix becomes available.

I found this by search engine looking for a fix for home button not working. I restored from backup - did not work. Considering the lint possibility as the phone was in my pocket most recently before the failure, I carefully dropped the phone from a height of about 18" onto a wood floor. Voila! The home button is working again.

Another thing you can do is set a passcode and set it to lock everytime you press the power button then after you press the power button it will want you to put the passcode in instead press emergency call on the bottom right and then press the arrow back then put in your pass code and youll be back at home screen

If the Prboricua818 method doesn't work for you, before throwing the phone away, try to plug it in to power for a few seconds and then unplug it. This seems to take care of the button problem, if the recalibration method doesn't work!!!

None of the slapping or holding button down combinations worked for me. What did work was: Double click home button to pull up your running apps, and shut down everyone of them. This is what apple suggests on their website and for me it worked. I was going to send my phone back and give up my untethered jailbreak, when I decided to get rid of everything running in the task manager and restart the phone and now, so far for two days, it's running like new again. If you're jailbroken, you can use a cydia app called, "killbackground" and this will shut down everything in the task manager with one button push; if not you'll have to manually shut down each app, but remember to restart the phone after you do this. I'm sure some of you might be having hardware issues, but If not, definitely try this. I'll report back if I find that my phone has gone back to not working.

Here is something a lot of people forgot to do: close out aps. The aps take all the memory if they're open, and will ultimately clog the home key, making it inoperable. Here's what you do:
A) Double click the home key (and I know your home key is unresponsive, just keep trying it for one of those rare moments it works)
B) a "bar" will appear along the bottom, showing all the aps you haven't closed.
C) Simply touch & hole one of the ap icons until it "jiggles" and the close icon appears (similar to deleting an ap)
D) touch the close icon on each ap until the bar is empty.
E) then do a reset (press home key and power button together until the white apple appears)
I know that sounds like a no-brainer, but it may save you a trip to the apple store. A lot of people forget to do this, then their home key freezes up and they think it's a hardware issue.

Yeah, this is what worked for me. I tried all of the other suggestions and they didn't work, but this did. I'm sure some of you may be having hardware issues but this is what you should try first, just make sure you restart the phone after you shut down all of your apps that are running.

I noticed sometimes after I update my phone the home button stops working. I either have to plug in and unplug again or restart. Some apps may also cause it to seem less responsive... memory issue? I close all my apps except the essential ones and it seems better.

Seems odd, my wife and I both have had our iPhone 4 for just over a year, warranty up and now home button is sticking (completely rules out the option that it is based on lint, potentially an OS but my suspicion is that it is a hack)
Whether it is an apple employee or other I can't presume to know.
So how many are having this problem with new phones - or are you just past your year warranty?

I tried both of these tricks and they worked... Temporarily. Everyone is probably going to think I'm absolutely retarded for mentioning this, but for me it turned out to be a simple thing: I hadn't manually closed out of my apps and had been using the "Home" button instead. After I manually closed out of a year's worth of apps, my home button was working like new! Yes, I'm embarrassed for not knowing this sooner, but hey, I might not be alone!
1) Double tap the home button to get to the shortcut bar @ the bottom of your screen (my somewhat-broken home button needed to be tapped a FEW times, but eventually I got there)
2) Once the shortcuts (4 at a time) are displayed, tap and hold your finger over one of them until a red circle with a minus sign appears on the top left corner.
3) From there, tap the minus sign to manually exit out of the app! You will have to do this for each app that's open.
And, no, exiting out of the "clock" app will not mean that your alarm won't go off. It will still work!

After trying Prboricua818's suggestion it looked like it had worked, but it wasn't long before the problem reappeared and it wouldn't go away this time. So, I setup an appointment with the Genius Bar and, even though I couldn't replicate the problem in the store (as is always the case), they replaced the phone on the spot! Very impressed!

A colleague mentioned a fix for this problem and it has worked so far. His theory is it is a problem with background apps.
Double click the home button repeatedly until you get the set of running apps St the bottom. Press and hold until they start jiggling then press the minus against them all one by one. This shuts down the apps running in the background.
Then click home again and you should find everything is back to normal.
Hth

Wow, this is total bullcrap and I can't believe all you people fell for this.
Step 4, how exactly do you press and hold the home button "lightly"? You either press and hold it or you don't, there's no "lightly" way. Or at least the phone has no way to register if the press&hold is light or hard.
Next, to prove this is total BS, you don't even have to do anything during step4 and you'll see the phone eventually returns to home screen by itself, after about 20 seconds. Yeah, that's some home button calibration!
Gotta love placebo!

My home button stopped working at all a few days ago after getting less responsive over the last few weeks. then miraculously, it started working again a few days ago. It just stopped working about an hour ago. I'm off to the Apple store in a bit to try and talk them into replacing it as it is only a few months old. Fingers crossed.

I didn't try any of the fixes below, I just had mine replaced. Thank goodness, because it was two weeks before the 1yr warrenty expired. No questions asked at the apple store. they just said there is no way to fix it so they gave me a new one. I would have tried the below if I had seen this earlier, but happy apple replaced it. Should last me another year, I hope.

Another happy slapper. My granddaughter was driving me crazy because her home button stopped working. Tried any and every gimmick I could find on the web. You name it - I tried it. I'll be, the slapping technique worked. Go figure. Besides, it felt really really good giving her phone a few good slaps!

Wow!
The power button/home button trick worked for me! I took my iPhone 4 to the genius bar and they wanted me to do a fresh install, not a restore. He said I was low on memory. I have tried to keep my free memory to 300+ Mb and home button was still goofy. I didn't do the restore. A real PITA to put everything
back etc. I thought I was going to be locked out of my phone as the home button was getting worse. Thanks all for your posts and advice here. My home button works perfectly!

i had to restart my ipod atleast 4times. it worked. but whenever i plug my ipod to the cpu and when i get a notification to slide thing freezes. whenever i plug headphones it messes up one side. a week or 2 later it messes up the whole thing. im going to apple to get it fixed or just replace it.

my home button has just completly stopped working. every time i want to go to a different app, i have to shut the whole phone down. i don't really see why it's doing this, it hasn't been exposed to a damp environment, and it is in a case..so really there isn't a explanation i can think of. i'm going to try sync it with the computer when i get home, but if this does not work, i'm going to have to get it replaced. meaning i will loose all my music i've brought on my phone (over £200 worth!) and all my apps too. not happy at all.

I just recently had my iphone replaced last week. Not only did my home button work but my lock button wouldnt either. When i went to the apple store, they said that my phones entire structure was loose. Thats the case for most of you. All of these tips are just quick fixes. Just go to apple and tell them your problem. They will replace it for free if you got your phone with in a year.
*make sure you back up your phone first(:

I just paid $22.87 for an iPad2-64GB and my girlfriend loves her Panasonic Lumix GF 1 Camera that we got for $38.76 there arriving tomorrow by UPS. I will never pay such expensive retail prices in stores again. Especially when I also sold a 40 inch LED TV to my boss for $675 which only cost me $62.81 to buy. Here is the website we use to get it all from, CentHub.com

I tried resetting network settings, blowing the charging slot with air can, and the holding power button then home button but the Two slaps across my thigh worked for me. Thanks! Hopefully I don't have to keep doing this after time.

Slapping: didn't work.
Blowing: didn't work.
Pinching: didn't work.
Holding down the power button until the power slide popped up then holding down the home button: didn't work.
NOTHING worked! :(
Power button does NOT work at all. Help
Me :'(

Should we really have to blow, slap, restore, etc a $200-$500 phone?! I'm sorry, but I'm super irritated with Apple for this hardware glitch, and the fact that I have to drive 2 hours to an Apple store to get it replaced. How long is the warranty?? I've only have phone for about 5 months and so far today I've restored, blew into charger slot, recalibrated the home button and none of them seem to be long-term solutions, as I keep having to do them over and over. I certainly don't want to have to do the thigh slap for the next year and a half of my contract, ya know?!

i phone 4 keys [P L X { DELETE]] not working. its new phone & i sent to technician /agent also they saying display must change & there is no guarantee for display the coast around 25 KD [$75] ..
any solution pls...?
thanks..

Here is another solution I have discovered. If you plug your sync cable into the phone and press the Home Button, it will start working again. Then, just unplug the cable. You don't even have to be charging or have it connected to your computer to have this work. I think inserting the sync cable shifts or resets something that then allows the Home Button to function again.

I am having the same issue with the home button not responding to the first couple clicks. As long with that issue I'm also having a problem with my voice command coming up and calling random numbers on its own. I could be texting and the next thing you know, the message board closes out and the voice command comes up and then closes and turns the search for the phone on. I have restored the phone back to its original settings, but as it syncs it says that the iphone is in recovery mode and now I cannot use it. Please help!!!

Just try not to hold the power button..
Click it just one, for a fraction of a second..
It will eventually go to sleep and then click it again..
After pressing the emergency call button and then back, enter ur passcode ..